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Final report:
A landscape approach to vegetation management
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Final report: A landscape approach to vegetation management (June 2007)
In November 2005, the NSW Government provided terms of reference to the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) for providing advice on whether it would be practical and beneficial for catchment management authorities (CMAs) and private landholders to develop native vegetation management plans at the 'landscape scale', and covering multiple properties.
This represented a change to the system, then in practice, in which CMAs and landholders developed vegetation plans at the property scale.
As a part of this review process, we released an issues paper to encourage stakeholder participation, a draft report to present our preliminary findings and recommendations, and a draft guide explaining how CMAs could assess multi-property vegetation plans.
In June 2007, we provided our final report to Government recommending a landscape approach to natural resource management. Our recommendations aim to better support CMAs to work with regional communities and other stakeholders to improve or maintain the health and productivity of landscapes in their regions and across NSW.
| Our final report to Government |
Our final report recommended that the NSW Government:
- explicitly adopt a landscape approach to underpin its natural resources policies and legislation (including the Native Vegetation Act 2003) and CMAs’ regional delivery of natural resource management in NSW
- encourage CMAs and natural resource management agencies to proactively use existing processes to refine the Property Vegetation Plan Developer, now called the Native Vegetation Assessment Tool (NVAT), over time so it can accommodate more elements of a landscape approach, including the capacity to appropriately assess proposed multi-property plans
- give CMAs greater flexibility (with appropriate accountability) to build on the strengths of the NVAT, but be better able to engage private landholders and regional communities in managing landscapes to deliver agreed environmental, economic and social values expressed in catchment and state-wide targets.
We also recommended specific steps to implement these recommendations.
As a part of this review, we:
- released an issues paper to invite stakeholder involvement in the review, receiving 25 submissions in response (see table)
- met with stakeholders and held an expert workshop to explore the potential benefits of managing vegetation at the landscape scale
- released a draft report to present and explain its findings and draft recommendations, receiving a further five submissions in response (see table)
- released a draft guide to multi-property vegetation plans which explains how CMAs, using the Standard for Quality Natural Resource Management, can promote and assess vegetation plans where they extend across multiple properties
- conducted a case study to review how CMAs might assess multi-property plans
- met with stakeholders and held workshops to discuss the draft report.
Useful link:
Native vegetation management (Office of Environment and Heritage website)